[knucklesandwich]

Yeah, just reread how I worded this and it's not quite correct. Your points here about how all synchronous exceptions are handled the same is correct. I think what I was trying to get at was that exceptions in pure code are usually treated like fatal errors.

The biggest challenge is definitely how easily exceptions can slip by handling code unless you make strict use of throwIO with synchronous exceptions (or something equivalent like throwM from exceptions). My favorite example is the following:

let foo = try . return $ error "foo".

Which evaluates to "Right * Exception: foo".